Крестьянский сад

Every summer from 1904 to 1907 Klimt left Vienna for the Attersee, a lake in the Austrian mountains, and painted the flower gardens around the house where he stayed. This is one of those, a square canvas filled edge to edge with blossom, with no sky and no horizon to give you your bearings. He liked to look at a scene through a small viewfinder cut from cardboard, or through a kind of spyglass, to isolate one dense patch of nature and flatten it. The blossoms crowd forward as a single shimmering wall of colour. The square format was almost a private rule of his landscapes, a shape he rarely used for anything else.